


Past Aggression

by Desdemona



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Drama, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-05-16
Updated: 2012-05-16
Packaged: 2017-11-05 12:05:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/406213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Desdemona/pseuds/Desdemona
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“We can do this one of two ways,” he says quietly when her glazed eyes finally meet his. “I can give you something to bite on and hold you down or I can tie you to the bed.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Past Aggression

**Author's Note:**

> Permanent hiatus cause I'm not coming back to the Avengers fandom any time soon. Sorry y'all :(

 

 

 

“ _You and I remember Budapest very differently.”_

 

_* * * *_

 

He remembers it as bloody.

Standing in a glass-walled shower, steaming rising to cocoon him, Clint remembers staring down and watching the blood wash off his body to swirl down the drain. His blood. Others’ blood.

Her blood.

 

* * * *

She remembers it as dark.

Working her way through a party in the palace, searching for a dirty diplomat in a sea of them, she remembers how everyone wore black, a direct and rather stark contrast against their opulent surroundings. She’s matching, save for her hair.

When she finally finds her target, he’s wearing a white tie.

A trap if she ever saw one.

 

* * * *

 

He remembers slipping from his nest to the ground. Silently knifing two guards within steps of each other. He picks a key from one of them, snaps his bow back to travel size and slips through a door. He follows the memorized map in his head, his gaze only categorizing what he needs to know. The camera tucked discreetly above a statue’s head, the other one barely visible near a chandelier here, there, and also over there.

A guard comes around the corner and Clint makes friends with the shadows in a nearby alcove before he’s seen. He stops breathing and looks at his watch. The time before the dead guards are found is three minutes at the max. That gives him a minute to get to his entrance point, half a minute to find his target and another half to neutralize it and escape.

That last minute is more of a precaution because he likes to be safe. The guard makes it to the end of the hall and turns another corner.

Clint waits a beat more before slipping from his spot.

The strains of a violin reach his ears before long, echoing through the wide, empty halls to bounce soundlessly against the tiled floor. He opens a door and slips in. Glances up and finds the vent, exactly where it’s supposed to be.

The library is dead quiet. His boots don’t make a sound on the carpet.

He snaps his bow out, clicks it toward the right one and shoots. A second later, he’s tugged the vent free. It makes a mute thump against the carpet when it drops. He kicks it under a nearby table. He slings the bow on his back and climbs up a massive book case to reach the vent.

Somewhere below him, toward the other side of the library, a door opens. Clint holds his breath, climbs faster and slips himself into the vent. It’s a tight fit, the way he’d figured since man-sized vents only exist in the movies to his ever-lasting disappointment. Still, it’s wide enough for him to use his bow, horizontally, and that’s all that matters. He works his way through, following the music and the mental map until he finds the vent leading to a massive ballroom.

Black-clad bodies mill a few feet below him, mingling. Just off to a corner, he can see a live orchestra playing. In another, a long table weighed with refreshments, manned by stoic-faced staff.

And in the middle of them all, like a ruby-red exclamation point, is his target.

Clint reaches into his belt for the mini screw and gets to work on the vent. His first minute and a half is almost up.

* * * *

She remembers dancing with her target. He’s exceedingly polite with her, thrilled that she can speak Russian and they converse in it while he dips and sways with her on the dance floor. There’s a pale patch of skin around his ring finger and his eyes are surprisingly lonely.

On his dossier, it said his wife had disappeared after creating a public scandal with his brother.

The bodies had never been found.

Natasha touches that spot with a finger tipped in black polish and smiles gently. He swallows, desire creeping across his face to flush his cheeks and throat. She runs her fingers up his tie, plays her knuckles along the adam’s apple bobbing just a little above the crisp white collar of his shirt.

He cups her elbows and leans down to whisper in her ear. Natasha listens but doesn’t, because the words may change but the meaning behind them doesn’t. She watches the crowd, keeping track of who’s paying attention to them.

There was always a chance of collateral damage.

No one is watching them. Not really. Not yet. When he stops talking, she glances up at him, tracks the way his pupils have dilated and nods. She tweaks her smile from gentle to seductive. He keeps a hold of her elbow and turns them. He starts to lift his hand to catch the attention of his guards.

It’s all she needs. The knife sinks in smoothly, bypassing his suit to the fragile flesh beneath and further still to the delicate organ waiting. He gasps softly and she twists, just a little bit, for the wife that they’ll never find. Then pushes up, deep before pulling free, hiding it back in it’s little sheath tucked in her sleeve.

He gurgles as she steps back and raises her voice to scream in horror. Everyone in her immediate vicinity turns as one as her dirty diplomat crumples to his knees, clutching his side, his eyes wide and panicked with onrushing death. Natasha backs up, letting another scream rip free. And just as expected, another woman screams with her. His guards rush forward as others take up the cry of horror and begin to run.

No one will stay. None of them are innocents.

She melts into the crowd, headed for the exit. She sees him as she goes, though she’s not sure what made her look up in the first place. He’s perched just out of view in a vent with a perfect view and she can just barely make out the bow stretched horizontally in front of him.

His gaze is empty of anything that she can read.

He disappears within moments.

And she wonders why he didn’t shoot.

* * * *

Clint makes his way back out of the palace, using the exit that would have been his escape. He balances his bow in his hand. His hand aches to pull back the string and fire away. He should have. He’d wanted to even.

Except.

Except watching her work is nothing short of scintillating. What his targets do isn’t something he’s ever let interest him before. He’s never cared long enough about them for them to become worthy _of_ interest. But watching Natasha Romanova own and destroy a man in less than thirty seconds is...breath-taking and he’d gotten sucked in, completely against his will, in watching her.

The idea of taking her down is almost depressing. That kind of skill should be used for something good or at least something better. He’s devoted to S.H.I.E.L.D, a loyal soldier, but never let it be said that he believes in the pure good of anything.

Clint drops his bow to his side and waits in the shadows for the shot he should have taken before. The crowd rushes out in a panicked black-covered mass, mixing with the guards that are suddenly moving and shouting into radios.

He glances at his watch. Three minutes.

When he looks up, she’s breaking away from the crowd. The moon catches on shapely, pale legs as she makes her way down the street.

Clint follows.

He comes around the curve of a wall in time to see her grabbed into a wide-mouthed alley. It’s like a cosmic joke. Nothing about this mission is going right but it doesn’t stop him from notching an arrow and burying it in the arm of her attacker.

The man starts to scream but Natasha has already whipped herself free and crushed his windpipe before he can manage a full note.

Everything goes to shit after that. Men rush out of nowhere, surrounding her. Clint lets loose a few poison-tipped arrows before throwing himself full bore into the fight. Blood splashes against his arms as he slashes the first man he comes to open at the throat. His own blood spills on his tongue when a fist glances off his mouth, forcing his teeth to cut into his lip.

Clint drives an arrow through that lucky fuck’s stomach.

Natasha takes down two by grabbing someone’s arm, breaking it and using him as a shield when someone else starts firing. She pulls her own gun to blow him away and drops the corpse in time to duck a flying roundhouse kick from the assailant behind her.

She puts a hole in his gut and keeps moving.

The fact that they work well together gets noted somewhere in the back of his head then pushed to the side when he realizes he’s out of arrows and Natasha’s gun clicks empty.

A leggy blonde comes into view to smile at them and lift her gun. Natasha hisses a second before the woman pulls the trigger.

 

* * * *

 

She always figured dying would be relieving.

It’s not.

It rips her apart from the inside out and burns like the sun chose to center all it’s considerable power onto her. Only the heat rushes back out and takes her with it. The agony too. The pain is unimaginable, on a scale that she’s only stepped on a handful of times.

Torture is not death. She’s been tortured. She understands torture.

This feels permanent.

This is a gut shot.

There is a chance of not coming back from this.

That’s the only relief she’s got. That she may not come back after all. That the memory of this pain will not be there to taunt her, to weaken her.

She won’t have yet another thing to battle through, day after day, night after night.

She wouldn’t have anything at all anymore.

Natasha stumbles and he’s suddenly there, grabbing her arm and forcing her back upright. The woman who’d shot her is on the ground, an arrow sticking out of her forehead.

Natasha starts shaking and knows that walking isn’t an option. That no amount of bravado will get her anywhere.

“Just finish me,” she says, clutching at her stomach. Her fingers slip in the blood that’s already soaking through her dress.

It’s the first words she’s ever spoken to him.

Him. Clint Barton.

 _Hawkeye_ .

She can admit now, while dying, that she’s impressed she’s warranted that kind of attention.

He doesn’t say anything to her, just settles his bow on his back and slings her arm around his neck to make her walk anyway. Her vision is white and black at the edges from the pain and she can’t stop a little grunt from escaping with each step.

But still, no damsel cradle. She likes him for that.

Natasha recognizes her rental car down the road and realizes that he doesn’t mean to let her die. At least not this way. Maybe it’s against his code.

She makes a grab for his knife and doesn’t even manage to touch it before he pops her, quick and almost gentle, on the cheek.

Natasha will never admit the gratitude that whips through her as she passes out.

 

* * * *

Clint gets her into his hotel via service elevator. It’s easier than it could have been but the hotel is deserted everywhere save the lobby. He can hear them all chattering excitedly as a TV plays the incident he’s just escaped as he walks down the hall toward his room.

Natasha is out cold when he lays her out on his bed. Clint sets his bow and empty quiver down. Her blood is all over him and he finds himself not able to actually process that so he tucks it away and goes for his med kit under the bed next to his bag of clothes.

He pulls out his knife, the one Natasha had made that one last desperate grab for and cuts her dress open. Clint rolls her gently, cutting the dress all the way around and sets his jaw when he doesn’t find an exit wound.

It’s now him against time.

He settles her on her back again and pulls a mid-sized pair of tweezers from the kit. He sterilizes his knife and tweezers in the bathroom sink with a generous helping of rubbing alcohol then grabs his ice bucket and fills it with freezing cold water.

Natasha wakes up sputtering and groaning when the water hits.

“We can do this one of two ways,” he says quietly when her glazed eyes finally meet his. “I can give you something to bite on and hold you down or I can tie you to the bed.”

To her credit, she doesn’t blink even as she slurs, just a little. “There’s no exit wound.”

“No.”

“And you can’t just stab me, can you.” It’s not a question but he answers anyway.

“That’s not how you deserve to go.”

She pauses while Clint wonders where the honesty came from. It’s not as if he and the truth are friends anymore.

“Fine,” Natasha says slowly, the slur already thicker and growing worse. “Hold me down.”

Clint nods. It would have been his choice too.

 

* * * *

 

Natasha doesn’t scream.

She nearly bites her own fingers off and he has to apply serious pressure to her chest when he probes with the tweezers and her body bucks. She twists against her will when he widens the wound with his knife. Clint only climbs on, braces his thighs against hers and keeps digging.

But she doesn’t scream.

There’s no soothing words from him either. They would have been lies.

She almost passes out twice but holds on through sheer stubbornness alone. Until, what feels like hours later, he holds up the bloody bullet.

There’s a light of respect in his eyes when she manages a shaky thumbs up.

 

* * * *

 

Clint sews her up, lifts a few bags of O positive from a nearby hospital and contacts S.H.I.E.L.D on a secure video call to tell them it’s going to be longer than expected.

Fury looks at him for a long moment, his stare unreadable. Clint doesn’t add anything extra, doesn’t explain anything. He’s destroyed his bloody clothing and Natasha is asleep on his bed in one of his two clean shirts.

“Sir?” he says, out of politeness more than anything else.

Fury finally blinks. “You have twenty four hours. Whatever mess you made shouldn’t need longer than that.”

“It won’t, sir.” 

Fury signs off without another word and leaves Clint staring at a blank screen.

 

* * * *

On hour ten of that allotted twenty four, she wakes up. Clint glances over to her as she struggles to sit up. He doesn’t move from his chair as she curses in guttural Russian and only nods when she does get herself upright.

She’s pale as a ghost, her mouth pursed tight against the pain. There's a bruise forming on her cheek from when he helped her along to unconsciousness. Her voice is thready and hoarse when she finally speaks.

“How long was I out?”

“Half a day.”

Natasha nods, closing her eyes. “Doing better than I thought.” She clears her throat and opens her eyes again. “You mind if I make a call? There’s a cell phone in my car. Secure.”

Clint looks at her. “We’re on the fourth floor,” he says, less like the warning he’d intended and more like a head’s up.

She shrugs. The flinch around her eyes is the only sign that the move cost her. “Does that mean you have a good view?”

Clint grabs his hotel key and his knife, aware that he’s making a choice that he doesn’t entirely understand yet and it sits wrong with him. And yet he makes it anyway. “Touch my bow and I’ll kill you.”

He heads out the door and leans against the wall, staring straight ahead. When his watch tells him it’s been around fifteen minutes, he goes back in.

And he stops in his tracks when he finds Natasha apparently out again. Her face is pale and drawn against his pillow. Her eyes open and catch him before he can....what, escape? He’s not sure what he would have done.

“Did you get it?” Her voice is low and tired but there’s also an edge to it, as if she’s aware of what he did and what she did. Or rather, what she didn’t do.

“I didn’t look for it.” That honesty again. It sits weirdly on his tongue and even more heavily in the air.

All she does, however, is nod and close her eyes. “I figured.”

 

* * * *

She has no idea why she didn’t run. She’s highly trained. Escaping a fourth floor hotel room with a newly sutured stomach is something she can do perfectly fine. Sure, she’s never been quite this close to death so quickly – being tortured is about the psychological more than the physical – but it’s not something she can’t handle.

Natasha should be miles away from here. From him. Instead, she’s curled in his bed, hooked up to the makeshift IV he’d crafted from a lamp and a hanger, her fingers picking at his T-shirt that she already knows she’ll be reluctant to take off. It doesn’t smell like him, the way a lot of her stuff doesn’t have her scent on it.

Just a non-descript laundry detergent you could find anywhere. It’s been washed a few times, enough to create the illusion of being comfortably worn. The way the jeans he wears are worn down to a dull, soft blue. She’d bet that’s how he’d come into Budapest, working the tourist con. Or on military leave.

He moves like a soldier. Like a sniper, really. He doesn’t make a sound when he moves from door to chair. Subtle but very much there muscles flex in his shoulders when he leans to pick up his bow along the way. His thumb plays along the string and she’s all at once fascinated with his hands.

They’re rough-looking, probably callused from holding his bow, from notching arrows. She doesn’t have to imagine what that looks like either; she saw it first-hand.

His aim is frightening, his speed and precision the stuff of myths and tall tales.

Natasha watches him through her eyelashes. “Why did you help me?”

Clint snaps his bow open. “If you’re going to stay, go to sleep.”

“Why?” She bristles, opens her eyes all the way. “Why not talk? It’ll pass the time til your deadline.” When he doesn’t react, Natasha grits her teeth and struggles carefully up to rest against the pillows. The pain has not lessened an iota since he fixed her up. He brought her no morphine but she can still taste the bourbon he’d ordered before she’d passed out the second time.

“C’mon, Barton,” she mocks, pseudo-gently. “You don’t think I know? How long were you given?”

Clint finally glances at her. “Enough. You need to rest.”

“Are you going to kill me?” Natasha clips that on to the end of his sentence, refusing to entertain even the pretense that she’s listening to him. “You have the advantage. My gun is gone. My knives are gone. Your bow is there, your knife is there. Are you going to?”

He sets his bow on the desk in the corner and turns to face her. Clint, she decides right then and there, is the master of the dark, hard stare. “If I didn’t off you when you were bleeding all over me, why would I do it when you’re flat on your back?”

Natasha can’t stop the bitter smile. “I’ve suffered worse on my back. Don’t do me any favours.”

“I’m not.” The corner of his mouth quirks for a fleeting moment. “Trust me.”

 

* * * *

Clint changes her blood bag and heads out when the sun begins to dip. He does a perimeter check, scales the building across from the hotel for anything worth note. Someone’s got to know that she’s not dead and whomever wanted her dead – besides S.H.I.E.L.D – was only going to come back harder.

He was going to have to move her.

Just like he was going to have to talk to Fury again. A gut shot was nothing to sneeze at. He’d have to come clean. Except then he’d have to explain why Natasha was still alive after all and he still hadn’t figured that out just yet.

All he knows is that killing her seems to no longer be on the table. Clint’s so caught up in that issue that he almost doesn’t notice the guy that slips out of the alley beside the building Clint’s perched on and heads across the street. Clint catches sight of him at the last second as the man looks up.

And call him crazy but it looks a shitload like the guy is looking right at Clint’s hotel window.

The man dips into a crowd coming out of the hotel. Clint takes off running, shooting a grappling arrow to the building next to him. He grabs the string and slides down fast, hitting the ground at a dead run. He ducks around the hotel toward the back. A few workers from the kitchen are unloading a mall delivery truck and they gawk when he swings into view, bow in hand.

His mind flies. They can fight in a hotel room but he still has to get her out. His exits are going to be compromised and one guy on the inside could mean hundreds on the inside. He needs a diversion, he needs to get his room and he needs to get a gun in Natasha’s hand. Why the hell didn’t he think about someone coming after her again? The very next day though. Why hadn’t he seen that coming?

Or maybe he had and he’d decided to guard her until she’s back in fighting form. He’s not even sure when he made that choice except it’s made and he’s pissed off that he’s already failing on the job.

As for a diversion....

“Where’s your generators?” he barks at one of the workers.

“Uh, there’s....there’s four back ups. And the main one.” One of them, a shaking kid with curly hair and wide, wide eyes answers him.

“Where. Are. They.”

“In the basement.”

“Take me to them.” Clint lowers his bow. “Now.”

The kid swallows. “Only security has keys to them.”

“I don’t need a key.”

* * * *

She’s wide-awake when Clint pops up at the window. He slips in soundlessly, pushing the glass and the screen out of the way in a manner that tells her that Clint has turned his room into a perfect assassin’s nest. Easy exit, hard entry and she’d bet he had weapons stashed everywhere.

She doesn’t have to guess when he puts her gun in her hand. She checks it over automatically, finds herself fully loaded and racks a round just for the satisfaction of hearing it click into place.

“What’s going on?” She pulls her IV from her hand, ignoring the slight pinch.

He puts up a finger in the universal wait sign. Natasha bites back a snippy comment and slides off the bed, forcing herself to ignore the way her body is just not having it. Her stomach aches, her sutures feel like tiny teeth pulling at her and her head has taken up conga lessons.

It’s hard to ignore all that. But she does and moves from the window to a crouch by the TV, her back to the wall and the rest of the room in her vision. Clint slips back into a corner across from her and notches an arrow.

Natasha opens her mouth to ask again and then the lights snap off. Darkness fills the room and outside, she can just make out the sound of hundreds of people gasping in shock. Not soon after that, the screams begin.

A splash of moonlight gives the room a vague smoky outline and she can just make out Clint, waiting.

“What’s going on, Barton? Another ambush?”

“No.” She can feel him staring right at her. “Execution.”


End file.
